The Media

(shortened url to this post: https://is.gd/NateWmediaquotes)

Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Norvell, 11 June 1807:

To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted so as to be most useful, I should answer ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers.

It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938):

The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies—unless one counts journalists.

Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy (Erwin Knoll, editor, "The Progressive"): 

Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true—except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.

Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect (Michael Crichton):

You read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate on those subjects than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

Button worn during the 1992 Republican Convention by the late Ginny Carroll, of the then-Washington Post-owned Newsweek (link):

Yeah, I'm in the Media--Screw You

Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "13. End of the Road...Death of the Whale...Soaking Sweats in the Airport":

Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits--a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

David Burge @iowahawkblog 6:57 AM - 9 May 2013:

Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.

Jim Treacher @jtLOL 18 Aug 2014:

Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn't know because they might reflect badly on Democrats.

Tom Wolfe interview, "Mummy Wrap", American Spectator (10 January 2005):

Interviewer: So you weren't surprised by the Dan Rather debacle?

Tom Wolfe: I wasn't surprised it happened. The media have a pretty wild history in this respect. Whenever somebody would make up a story, they would say, 'Oh, that's the influence of the New Journalism.' God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.

Marco Arment, 11/16/14:

Almost every time I’ve talked to a reporter has gone this way: they had already decided the narrative beforehand. I’m never being asked for information — I’m being used for quotes to back up their predetermined story, regardless of whether it’s true. (Consider this when you read the news.) Misquotes usually aren’t mistakes — they’re edited, consciously or not, to say what the reporter needs them to say.

Talking to reporters is like talking to the police: ideally, don’t. You have little to gain and a lot to lose, their incentives often conflict with yours, and they have all of the power.

Professor Ann Althouse, 2/4/17 12:11 PM:

Speaking as a lawprof who used to take calls from reporters, I eventually figured out that the reporter always had the idea of what I was going to say and would keep talking one way or another at me to try to get me to say it. When I realized that all my effort explaining things in a service-oriented way was wasted and the only quote that was used was the thing I could see, in retrospect, the reporter was taking up my time trying to get me to say, I stopped taking calls — to save time and to protect myself from distortion and exploitation.

Finley Peter Dunne, "Newspaper Publicity" in Observations by Mr. Dooley (1902):

Whin annything was wrote about a man 'twas put this way: "We undhershtand on good authority that M-l-chi H---y, Esquire, is on thrile before Judge G---n on an accusation iv l--c-ny. But we don't think it's true." Nowadays th' larceny is discovered be a newspa-aper. Th' lead pipe is dug up in ye'er back yard be a rayporther who knew it was there because he helped ye bury it. ... Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward. They ain't annything it don't turn its hand to fr'm explainin' th' docthrine iv thransubstantiation to composin' saleratus biskit.

George Orwell, "Looking Back on the Spanish War" (1943):

Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.

C.S. Lewis (age 26), diary entry regarding Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, (July 1924), published in Letters (1966), p. 97:

The man is a humbug — a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull…

Malcolm Muggeridge, "The Great Liberal Death Wish", lecture at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan, USA, March 1979 (pdf):

We foreign journalists in Moscow used to amuse ourselves, as a matter of fact, by competing with one another as to who could wish upon one of these intelligentsia visitors to the USSR the most outrageous fantasy…One story I floated myself, for which I received considerable acclaim, was that the huge queues outside food shops came about because the Soviet workers were so ardent in building Socialism that they just wouldn't rest, and the only way the government could get them to rest for even two or three hours was organizing a queue for them to stand in. I laugh at it all now, but at the time you can imagine what a shock it was to someone like myself, who had been brought up to regard liberal intellectuals as the samurai, the absolute elite, of the human race, to find that they could be taken in by deceptions which a half-witted boy would see through in an instant…I could never henceforth regard the intelligentsia as other than credulous fools who nonetheless became the media's prophetic voices, their heirs and successors remaining so still.